BITS Lab could not be prouder to share that two outstanding alumnae of NY
U’s program in Communicative Sciences and Disorders will be returning to the lab with support from administrative supplements from the National Institutes of Health. Samantha Ayala ’18, who completed her MS in speech-language pathology at Columbia and earned clinical certification this past summer, will be returning to the lab for one year as a full-time research clinician. She will support data collection for our ongoing randomized controlled trial (NIH R01 DC017476, “Biofeedback-Enhanced Treatment for Speech Sound Disorder: Randomized Controlled Trial and Delineation of Sensorimotor Subtypes” ) and is also launching her own research project looking at variability in the speech of children with residual speech sound disorder.
Wendy Liang received her MS in SLP from NYU in 2016. She has worked as a medical speech-language pathologist and swallowing disorders specialist for one of the largest health systems in Texas, and she founded Burgundy & White, a nonprofit that aims to promote survivorship and continued care for individuals impacted by head and neck cancer. Wendy’s work in BITS lab will be supported by NIH funds through the program “Administrative Supplements to Support Collaborations to Improve the AI/ML-Readiness of NIH-Supported Data.” This was one of fifty awards across all the NIH institutes. Together with partners at Syracuse University (Jonathan Preston, Asif Salekin, and Nina Benway, whose dissertation research made the supplement possible) and Montclair State University (Elaine Hitchcock), this project will lay groundwork for the development of automated speech recognition tools for children with speech sound disorder. We will modify and augment an existing corpus of acoustic recordings of child speech and test an algorithm for automated classification of productions as accurate or inaccurate. The project is advised by Yvan Rose (Memorial University of Newfoundland) for corpus sharing and Carol Espy-Wilson (University of Maryland) for engineering design.
Congratulations and welcome back to Wendy and Sam!